Odd Thomas Odd Blog

Have you ever wondered what a cross between Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead and Run Fatboy, Run would produce? No, me neither, but today I discovered what the result could look like as RoadRunner* kindly pointed out that the pics are in on the Great Run website, so now the world and his mum can see the full horror for themselves! Number seven says it all really... * Unfortunately, RoadRunner has stopped blogging, but you can still check out her pics with race number 35018 ;-)

Well, the curtain has been called and the set dismantled for another three-and-a-half months as our production of "A Murder is Announced" closes with a record audience number of around 130!! Henderson Hall is not a particularly large place and we generally have a maximum audience of 100, but due to so many advanced bookings for the Friday and Saturday nights, we had to put a couple of extra rows out.  Everyone has been astounded :-) I think it is safe to say that everyone felt Saturday night's performance was bugged by a few little gremlins, but everyone took it in their strides and the feedback from the audience was that it was a very enjoyable production, so smiles all round! As a way of saying thanks to the cast and crew, the producer managed to sneak some little gifts up to the dressing room for when the play closed and we all piled in full of the highs of a complete production ... I now have my very own Oscar!  LOL My first ... and final ... 'Oscar'!! Some o...

Whoever coined the phrase "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" wasn't far wrong! No sooner am I back from the Great North Run than I am straight into final rehearsals for the next production by the Centralian Players , "A Murder is Announced", a fifty-year celebration for one of the group's members. Fifty years! That's a long time to dedicate to a hobby - I usually get bored after just a couple! :-) After three days of technical rehearsals that ranged from absolute disaster* to pretty good run-through, we finally opened last night and that's when the nerves finally hit. Its fine when its just the group of you that learned the script together, but add an audience to the mix and my stomache suddenly starts somersaulting like a clumsy trapeze artist. In fact, its starting its little routine again as I sit here typing this! Andrex is making a mint out or me right now. * Tuesday's technical rehearsal was the worst to date. That said, I have...

Okay, not so much fatboy as love-handle boy, but the Great North Run 2008 was still a challenge! As per usual, I was a little late booking a place to stay but was incredibly lucky to find a characteristic little guest house called Bush Nook about a month beforehand, situated along the A69 between Carlisle and Newcastle. My little bed - very comfy! Slept like a log! The shower/toilet room - where I broke the flush :-$ Some of the room's character :-) Due to the bad weather on the way up on Saturday, I was rather late arriving and the owners were starting to wonder if I would arrive at all. I did ... seven hours after I set off. I know I'm not a speedy driver, but that's a long time even for me. The forecast was that there would be showers on the Sunday morning, so I had made sure that I had a suitable running jacket. I didn't need it. When I opened the curtains first thing Sunday morning I was greeted with a view that made me long to live in the hills: Imagine waki...

A year or so ago, I wrote a rather harsh review of the cappucinos made by a new smoothie bar that had opened in Tring, called Smooth ... and no, I'm not adding any links to that post as I am quite ashamed of how harsh I was! However, that didn't actually stop me from going there most lunchtimes to grab a smoothie and cookie for lunch: prior to M&S opening there, it was the only place to get anything reasonably healthy without hiking out of town to the little Tesco store. With the opening of M&S , all the good food options started appearing, so Smooth, Sandwich Plus and Tesco were all pushed to the back of my mind. Smooth re-opened after a short refurbishment period, but something seemed to be wrong. You couldn't guarantee from one day to the next that it would be open. Pretty much every other day, there would be a sign in the window stating that it was closed due to staff sickness, somewhate ironic considering the nature of the business! Then finally, during the...

In the previous post , I introduced you to what can only be termed the ultimate law of the IT Certainty Principle: For any piece of IT work, the chance of implementing that work is inversely proportional to the amount of effort involved. This is, essentially, a law that defines the likelihood of a project being shelved. However, there are a series of other laws that you need to get through before this ultimate law can define the final fate of the project. The penultimate of these is one that I see all too often on projects and jobs that have the dreaded 'NOW' deadline: For any piece of IT work, the closer the deadline and the higher the priority of the work, the greater the occurrence of system issues and general interruptions. You all know what I mean by this! You either have a project that is closing in on the deadline with lots still to do, or you have just been handed a piece of work that needs to be done 'NOW'. All of a sudden, your computer - which was running f...

With the LHC called to a halt for a short while, perhaps Brian Cox would like to consider measuring the impact of the collisions going off inside my head? Okay, there is no guarantee of catching sight of any Higgs Bosons but he may get to witness the IT Certainty Principle, the laws of which state that for any piece of IT work, the chance of implementing that work is inversely proportional to the amount of effort involved! I don't know about particle accelerators but I seem to be caught in a project accelerator, with everyone poised to see what kind of big bang I'll be generating ... hmmm, geeky intros are never a good sign!! I guess you could say that things are not going all that great right now. As the above suggests, I've been putting huge effort into projects that have then been canned and very little effort into projects that have actually seen the light of day. Currently, we are having to put a tremendous amount of effort into three major projects that are to be ...